Jim Geraghty writes for National Review Online about major media outlets’ questionable response to the Charlie Kirk assassination.

ABC’s Matt Gutman on ABC News Live, Tuesday afternoon, after Utah law-enforcement officials formally announced the charges against the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s murder:

“It’s heartbreaking on so many levels, Kyra. Obviously, Charlie Kirk was murdered brutally in front of a crowd of thousands of people who watched him getting shot through the neck, and essentially bleed out in front of them.” …

… “And then those text messages. And I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a press conference in which we’ve read text messages that are A, so fulsome, so robust, so apparently, allegedly self-incriminating and yet, on the other hand, so touching — right? — with the suspect reaching out to his roommate, who was allegedly his boyfriend, who we understand, you know, you know, identified as male at birth, now identifies as female. And the terminology he used, he was trying to protect him. He kept calling him ‘my love.’” …

… How do you come away from this situation and one of your first thoughts is that this was some sort of “touching,” tragic, doomed romance? What, were you watching Romeo and Juliet last night? …

… What Matt Gutman chooses to say off the cuff does not necessarily represent all of ABC News, nor all television journalists nor all journalists. But with that caveat in mind . . .

Why are you like this, mainstream media?

Why is it that when confronted with a horrible situation where someone who identified with the left did something terrible, and someone on the right is an innocent victim, you feel an apparently uncontrollable urge to romanticize the perpetrator?

Why, in recent days, have we witnessed this full court press, from Laurence Tribe to Jemele Hill to Jimmy Kimmel to Reuters, contending that Charlie Kirk’s assassin had to be a right-wing figure? Why is there this reflexive refusal to believe that someone who identifies as being on the left side of the political spectrum could do something terrible and violent?